


Suburban Mating Call: A Day in the Life

by Lbilover



Series: Suburban Mating Call Series [2]
Category: The Lord of the Rings RPF
Genre: Alternate Universe, Gen, Humor, Pre-Slash, Romantic Comedy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-09
Updated: 2016-12-09
Packaged: 2018-09-07 13:13:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,444
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8802181
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lbilover/pseuds/Lbilover
Summary: As he shops for cat food, Sean contemplates his unhappy life, unaware that things are about to take a turn for the better.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Set pre-Elijah, but better to read after the first SMC story.

Who knew there were so many varieties of canned cat food? Sean scans the crowded shelves with disbelieving eyes. He’s never so much as strolled down the pet food aisle of his local supermarket before, never having owned a pet (not that he exactly owns one now) and he’s frankly astonished, and even a little outraged. 

_Meow Mix, Fancy Feast, Friskies, 9 Lives, Kit ‘N Kaboodle…_

How on earth do they expect a consumer to decide? Eenie, meenie, miney, mo? Well, Sean’s theory has always been: _When in doubt, choose the most expensive brand. How bad can it be?_ He peruses the shelf tags as if the fate of the Free World rests on his selection, and finally settles on Fancy Feast Gourmet Cat Food. 

After carefully checking the expiration dates, Sean adds cans of ‘Gourmet Salmon and Shrimp Feast’, ‘Chopped Grill Feast’, ‘Savory Salmon Feast’, and ‘Ocean Whitefish and Tuna Feast’ to the meager and unappetizing contents of his shopping cart: iceberg lettuce, celery, carrot sticks, anemic-looking tomatoes, non-fat blueberry yogurt, a quart of skim milk, low-fat Ranch salad dressing, and the loathed, but essential, Lean Cuisine entrees. 

Dieting sucks. Especially when you have to pass the frozen dessert section to reach the frozen dinners, and the beloved sweets plead with you to rescue them from their glass prison: Sara Lee cheesecake, Haagen-Dazs ice cream, Mrs. Smith’s pies. He’d hustled past, steadfastly ignoring their siren calls, but he doesn’t feel virtuous, only regretful.

Half a dozen cans of ‘Tender Beef and Chicken Feast’ complete Sean’s selections, and with the cart nicely fleshed out by the tower of cat food, he is able to move on feeling as if he’s really grocery shopping, like those families he sees stocking up on giant boxes of cereal, gallon containers of milk and mega-cans of SpaghettiO’s. 

It’s a pleasant feeling, until he recalls that he doesn’t _have_ a family or even a cat, just a stray that has wandered into his backyard twice this week, and might never turn up again to eat the food that he is buying for it. _**I** can always eat the food,_ he thinks dolefully. _It’s got to taste better than Lean Cuisine._

“God, you are _so_ pathetic,” he says to himself as he pauses to pick out a roll of Viva paper towels, selecting one that has a pretty teapot design that will go perfectly with the décor in his kitchen.

“Well, I never,” a voice says. Startled, Sean looks up and meets the outraged glare of an elderly woman in a powder blue nylon pants suit. Her steel gray hair is done up in wide plastic rollers under what looks like a piece of bright yellow fisherman’s net. “Just because I buy the store brand and not those overpriced designer paper towels _you_ like is no reason to get offensive, young man,” she sniffs, having obviously overheard and misinterpreted Sean’s comment. 

She dumps her paper towels in her cart and starts pushing it; the wobbling left front wheel takes dead aim on his expensive brown leather Mephistos. He snatches his foot out of the way in the nick of time, certain it was no accident.

“But… but… I didn’t… I wasn’t…” Sean fumbles the words like a principal dancer misjudging his prima ballerina’s swan dive into his arms, and by then it’s too late. She’s gone, taking her store brand paper towels, her yellow hair net, and her bad opinion of him with her. 

He sighs, unutterably depressed. _You’ve started talking aloud to yourself in public places, Sean. It’s the beginning of the end, you know. Next thing you’ll be holding entire imaginary conversations with yourself while running naked around the front lawn in the rain, scaring the bejesus out of your neighbors._

But the thought is somehow oddly appealing, and Sean starts to panic. He’s had an increasing number of moments like this of late, moments when he feels the urge to do something completely crazy and out of character. To quell the panic, he begins to calculate amortization schedules in his mind. _A 30 year mortgage at 7% on a $700,000 house yields a monthly payment of $4,657. A 25 year mortgage at 6% on a $250,000 house yields a monthly payment of $1,610._

The familiar mental arithmetic restores his sense of balance. The secret to success, Sean has always believed, lies in maintaining a strict discipline and keeping your life and mind in perfect order: a place for everything, and everything in its place. That is his mantra. 

He decides that when he gets home, he’ll empty out his cutlery drawer and reorganize the entire thing, maybe even replace the drawer liner, although technically it doesn’t need replacing until his May spring cleaning. After he’s done that, he’ll tackle his clothes closet. He has a sneaking suspicion that at least one of his winter suits has gotten mixed up with his spring suits, and it’s been nagging at him like a particularly jagged hangnail.

With his grocery shopping finished, Sean heads toward the check-out lanes, feeling calmer now. But he keeps a wary eye out for the old lady and the lethal, wobbling wheels of her cart. As he turns the corner at the end of the paper goods aisle, he sees a man waiting in Lane 3 who immediately sets off his gaydar as if Barbra singing the theme from _The Way We Were_ is playing full blast over the supermarket’s tinny sound system. Physically, he’s exactly Sean’s type: slender, dark-haired and no taller than Sean. There is a tasteful small gold hoop in his right earlobe, and he’s wearing snug-fitting jeans, a loose-fitting white shirt with blouson sleeves tucked into them, and brown suede Birkenstocks. 

_Maybe today’s my lucky day,_ Sean thinks, walking faster so that he can get on line behind the cute unknown before someone else does. A nervous flutter invades his stomach as he realizes that he will have to catch the young man’s attention somehow. Ideas tumble around in his brain like laundry on the permanent press cycle. He can take a leaf from the book of the old lady, he decides. Not run over the cute unknown’s feet, of course, but maybe ‘accidentally’ (and gently) bump him in the butt with the front end of the cart. He’ll apologize, they’ll make eye contact, Sean will strike up a friendly conversation, and voila! Before he’s even swiped his credit card through the reader and disinfected it with an alcohol pad, they’ll have exchanged phone numbers…

“Here you go, babe. Can you believe we almost forgot the coffee? It’s the main reason we came.” A tall, extremely well-built blonde guy has joined the cute unknown and is handing him a bag of Starbuck’s blend, while he rests his other hand on his partner’s hip. Heads tilted together, they laugh at the silly mistake, the sort of intimate laugh that implies this is not the first time they’ve forgotten the coffee (or whatever they’d come to the supermarket specifically to buy before they got distracted by the strawberry flavored condoms Sean is certain are residing in their shopping cart). 

The butterflies vanish, replaced by a heaviness that is eerily reminiscent of the aftereffects of eating one of his grandmother Astin’s flour dumplings. He should have known. He fucking should have known.

_Sean Astin, This Is Your Life._ If the words had come booming over the loudspeaker, Sean wouldn’t have been surprised. He feels like a contestant on a particularly cruel game show where every failed relationship he’s had over the years - and there are a few, although none of recent vintage, as he hasn’t been in a relationship _to_ fail for several years - will be dragged out and replayed in hideous detail. With commentary. And a laugh track.

_Think of the starving children, Sean,_ he chides himself as he backs away from Lane 3 and moves all the way down to Lane 12 where he finds himself behind one of those families with a gigantic order, 39572 coupons, and an unsmiling toddler in the baby seat who fixes her round brown eyes disconcertingly and unswervingly on Sean’s face. _Why do babies always pick me to do that to_ , he wonders.

_Think of the homeless, the destitute, the jobless,_ he continues, trying not to flinch under that unblinking, somehow accusatory, stare. But enduring that stare is a million times better than watching the lovebirds in Lane 3 bill and coo. _What right do you have to complain, anyway? You have a beautiful home, a healthy bank balance, and a good (if mind-numbingly boring to prospective beaux) job._

But all the chiding in the world can’t dispel the leaden sensation in the pit of his stomach, and for once his native guilt doesn’t give a damn about the starving children and the homeless. He wallows, he _drowns_ in self-pity, he draws it tightly around him like a hair shirt, and he revels in every itch and chafe. 

_I want to be loved, God. I want to share an intimate laugh with someone over forgetting the coffee_ , he silently whines. _Is that too much to ask? Is it?_

The toddler’s face suddenly screws up tight, turns alarmingly red, and then, as if she is channeling Sean, she lets out an ear-splitting, prolonged wail.

“WAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!”

Which pretty much sums up exactly how Sean feels.

~~~

By the time Sean arrives home, however, steering his recently waxed and detailed silver Lexus into the immaculate driveway and pressing the button on the garage door opener, he is more philosophical about the events at the supermarket. The cute unknown might have been exactly his type in some ways, but he _had_ been wearing those ugly Birkenstocks and something that could only be termed a peasant blouse, not to mention that his hair was stringy and overly long. 

By the time he has carried the groceries into the house and deposited them on the kitchen island, the Unsuitable Dating Material alarm that lives in the depths of his brain has done its work with its usual efficiency. Sean realizes what a narrow escape he has had from a life of hugging trees, eating granola, and attending Ye Olde Renaissance Faires where he would undoubtedly have to dress in some sort of ridiculous _faux_ medieval costume and stroll around playing the lute very badly. 

Not to mention that if he ever _does_ hug a tree he is absolutely convinced that he’ll come down with a terrible rash or some sort of weird flesh-eating disease caused by the strange, unhealthy-looking bumps and knobs that most trees sport. If God had meant for people to hug trees, he thinks as he empties the paper bags, He would have made their bark out of something squashy, like foam rubber.

When he is done, Sean turns on the small television on the kitchen counter, and listens to Brian Williams on NBC while he puts away the groceries. It’s important to stay informed, he has always believed, which is why he religiously watches the evening news (it has nothing to do with the news anchor’s rugged good looks, he tells himself) and sets aside time to read the _New York Times_ every morning before he leaves for his mind-numbingly-boring-to-prospective-beaux accounting job in the Valley at _Tell, Pearce, Arnaz and Astin_. 

Of late, however, he has wondered if his life hasn’t become a little _too_ predictable, too safe. Each day of the week is as regimented as if Sean were an Army General managing a major battle offensive. On Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, he takes a long lunch and plays squash. Tuesday evening is his wine club meeting. Thursday evening he has a Grand Circle subscription to the L.A. Opera. Saturday he visits his parents, and Sunday is his grocery shopping, housecleaning and laundry day. 

He tries not to think about the unregimented nights, when he lies awake listening to the soothing hum of his white noise machine and wishes there were someone with whom he could have regularly scheduled sex and cuddling, or actually imagines that nebulous someone exists - a slender young man with dark hair, and eyes that are sometimes gray, sometimes blue, but always alight with love as they stare into his own - while he strokes himself to a lonely and unsatisfactory (not to say messy) climax. 

As he places the iceberg lettuce in the crisper, that image of himself running naked around his front lawn in the rain flashes into his brain. Good thing it’s still the dry season, he thinks. _You could always turn on the lawn sprinklers…_

Sean resolutely ignores the sly voice of temptation urging him to run mad, and turns his attention to the cat food cans piled on the island’s Corian marble countertop. “See?” he says aloud to the empty room. “I do sometimes take risks. I’m about to start feeding a stray cat.” He is tempted to add, childishly, “So there.”

He has previously cleared a space in one of the cupboards for the cat food, and now he shelves the cans in orderly rows by type, reserving one can of ‘Chopped Grill Feast’ to put out for the stray. Then he realizes that he forgot to purchase a cat food bowl. He contemplates removing the lid and simply putting the food outside still in the can, but that might be dangerous. What if the poor thing cut its mouth on the sharp edges? 

Sean doesn’t own a single paper plate or plastic bowl - so wasteful not to mention uncivilized - so he reluctantly decides to use a china cereal bowl, and takes one out of the cabinet. He has plenty, after all, and he can surely spare one for the cat. He will have to be careful, of course, not to mix it back up with its mates afterward. He has never quite trusted dishwashers, even though they are supposed to make things sterile.

He pops the lid on the ‘Chopped Grill Feast’ and makes a horrible face at the scent that greets his awaiting olfactory sense. Okay, so maybe not a substitute for Lean Cuisine, he thinks as he gingerly deposits the curving silver lid in the trashcan, and hopes the rumor he’s heard that some poor people are actually reduced to eating cat food is only that, a rumor. The stuff stinks to high heavens. Wishing he could pinch his nose shut, he spoons the amorphous brown glop into the bowl with what he will henceforth refer to as the ‘cat spoon’, adds the empty can to the trash (thank goodness tomorrow is pick up day), and carries the bowl - held at arm’s length - outside to the back patio. 

The sun is setting and the sky is awash in brilliant colors due to the heavier than usual smog that afternoon. Sean stands for a moment, trying not to breathe too deeply of the smoggy air, and admires his tidy backyard. It is surrounded by a gleaming black wrought iron fence and bordered with neatly mulched beds that are planted with a tasteful selection of ornamental grasses, low-growing evergreens, Yucca, lilies and annual flowers (except begonias; he loathes begonias). The grass is a uniform deep green, and mowed so evenly that a level placed across the top lies perfectly straight. Sean knows. He’s done it. It had taken Sean three years to find a lawn service that was up to snuff, but it was totally worth going through practically every business listed in the yellow pages until he found Mr. Right, or rather, Mr. Alfonso’s Artistic Landscape Maintenance. 

He tries not to think about the fact that the stray cat is probably doing its business in the flowerbeds. _It’s not your planet, Sean. The earth belongs to all living creatures,_ he tells himself with a level of pomposity that is high even for him.

Oh dear lord, he must have been infected by the cute unknown in the Birkenstocks. Next thing he’ll be hugging trees naked in the pouring rain and end up in the hospital with flesh-eating disease. Of course, Sean has read that hospitals are a great place to meet cute guys, but he isn’t certain he’s willing to go to such lengths. Besides, supermarkets are also supposed to be a great place to meet cute guys, and look how well that had worked out.

He walks to the edge of the slate-flagged patio and sets the bowl down in the spot where he has twice seen the stray cat sitting and looking wistfully (or so it seemed to Sean) toward the house. 

“Here kitty, kitty,” Sean calls softly, tapping the side of the bowl with his forefinger. “Here kitty, kitty. Supper’s ready.”

He suspects that the cat won’t appear if he hangs around, so Sean goes back inside the house and starts his own supper. He sticks a Lean Cuisine Orange Peel Chicken in the microwave, and while it nukes he cuts a wedge of iceberg lettuce and plops it on a plate, adding slices of the anemic tomato and a squirt of the low-fat Ranch dressing. He toasts one piece of Health Nut bread, spreads the thinnest possible layer of I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter (or, as he likes to call it, _Sean_ Can Certainly Believe It’s Not Butter) across the surface, and decides that maybe the cat food would have been an improvement after all. At least it had some flavor. 

But he has wine, god damn it, good wine. That will make up for a lot. He takes a bottle of Pinot Grigiot from the refrigerator and contemplates simply yanking out the cork, downing the entire contents in one long gulp, and getting so shit-faced drunk that he won’t notice how awful his meal is. 

“First you’re talking to yourself aloud, and now you want to get drunk alone. This is bad, Astin. Very, very bad,” he says aloud, and then cringes as he realizes that he’s done it again. It seems inevitable now that he will soon be running naked around the front lawn in the rain while he holds a conversation with himself, hugs trees, and terrifies the neighbors. 

“I’m doomed,” he moans, clutching the bottle to his chest. “Doomed.”

He doesn’t get shit-faced drunk, however, because he has a sudden, vivid image of the faces of his fellow wine club members frozen into identical rictuses of horror as he pours the wine straight down his throat. Instead, he carefully opens the Pinot and allows it to breathe while the frozen dinner finishes cooking. Then he pours one glass, and puts the bottle back in the refrigerator out of temptation’s reach. He sips the Pinot while he glumly eats his morbidly healthy supper and wonders if 'morbidly healthy' is an oxymoron. The wine fortunately outlasts the food; Sean dons his rubber gloves, scrubs the dirty dishes and then puts them in the dishwasher, careful to separate the ‘cat spoon’ from the others. 

After that, he decides to see if the stray cat has appeared to take advantage of the free meal. Carrying the wine with him, he goes to the sliding glass patio door, tiptoeing up to it just in case the cat is there and will be startled into running away. 

Even though it’s irrational, Sean knows he will be disappointed if the cat hasn’t shown. But the timer-run patio floodlights that came on at dusk reveal a small black and white figure crouched over the cereal bowl, and his heart actually gives a little leap of happiness. His offering hasn’t been rejected, as so many others have been in the past. Finally, someone needs him. It’s a good feeling, a damn good feeling, and unlike the good feeling in the supermarket earlier, this one doesn’t pass.

Despite his cautious approach, the cat senses his presence and looks up. It has pale green eyes set in a face that appears slightly squished, as if it has run into one closed door too many in its life. The cat reminds Sean of the Cowardly Lion in _The Wizard of Oz_ , his favorite character in one of his favorite movies, and his heart warms to it. He’s run into more than a few closed doors himself during his lifetime - metaphorically speaking, of course, although his nose has never been his favorite feature.

After a few tense moments, the cat returns its attention to its food, and Sean lets out a breath he hasn’t realized he’s been holding. Leaning forward, he presses his ear against the glass. He can hear a sort of muted rusty rasp as the cat snatches up mouthfuls of the ‘Chopped Grill Feast’. It sounds like an engine that hasn’t been oiled in years. He realizes that this must be the cat’s version of a purr, and the warm feeling in his heart intensifies. 

He remains standing motionless at the door until the cat has finished eating, and cleaned its long whiskers with its front paws. Sean is tempted to run and soap a wet washcloth for it, but he supposes that this is a cat’s idea of good hygiene, and at least it _is_ very thorough. When the cat’s ablutions are done, it fixes Sean with its large, pale green eyes for a long moment, and then melts away into the darkness beyond the reach of the floodlights. Was that gratitude in the cat’s eyes? Sean isn’t sure, but he thinks so.

Later that night, as he returns to the house after putting the garbage out by the curb, Sean sees a pair of eerie, disembodied eyes glowing uncannily from the bushes that divide his house from his neighbor on the right. After an adrenaline-pumping second of pure, undiluted panic that the aliens have finally arrived to take him away, as he’s always suspected they might (and he has sometimes been tempted to ask his friends if they share this same fear, suspecting that it is some atavistic human paranoia, but he has always chickened out because, if his theory is wrong, they will think he is even more eccentric than they already do). He realizes, however, that it’s not an alien, but simply the cat, watching him. Unless, of course, the _cat_ is an alien. But he decides it’s best not to venture down that road.

“Hello,” he says brightly, out of his relief.

The eyes vanish.

“Well, good night,” he adds, giving a little wave. And he doesn’t feel crazy talking aloud, because this time there is someone to listen to him.

Before Sean goes to bed, he resets his alarm clock so that he will be awakened fifteen minutes earlier than normal. This will be his new routine during the workweek, because he will need the extra time to feed his cat.

His cat.

_I have a cat._

Sean goes through his usual nighttime ritual of exfoliating, creaming, brushing, flossing, and gargling, changes into his favorite paisley silk pajamas, and climbs into bed. He lies there staring up into the dark, listening to the soothing sound of the white noise machine and thinking about the cat. It occurs to him that he has no idea if it’s female or male, and it seems impolite to continue to refer to it as ‘it’, especially when it has chosen his backyard to move into. 

_Female, definitely female,_ his brain insists. Why, Sean isn’t sure. Okay then, the cat is a girl. _And she needs a name_ , adds his brain. A name. Hmm. That’s true, she does need a name. But what sort of name should he give her? 

Sean has always loathed the silly, cutesy names that other people give their pets, names like Fluffy or Buttons or Precious. _His_ cat will have a cultured and sophisticated name. Aida, perhaps, or Madama Butterfly, or Carmen. Yes, something from one of his favorite operas should do nicely. 

He decides to sleep on it, and let his subconscious settle the matter. He’s sure the perfect name will come to him while he sleeps.

~~~

Boots is waiting on the patio when Sean goes to check after showering and dressing for work and retrieving the morning’s _New York Times_ from the door step. He highly approves of her punctuality, especially as his job frequently requires him to do the taxes of Hollywood celebrities who consider themselves on time if they arrive for their appointments with him no more than two hours late. He and Boots should get on just fine.

Boots. Sean sighs. His subconscious has indeed come up with a name for the cat, and it is stubbornly insisting on it, even though no opera heroine has ever been called Boots, at least as far as Sean knows. It’s all the fault of the cat’s cute white paws, Sean thinks, as he unlocks the sliding glass door, removes the security bar in the track, opens it a few inches and wishes Boots a good morning. The cat is mostly black, except for a white bib, an uneven white splotch down the center of her face, and perfectly symmetrical white boots that cover her paws and extend halfway up her legs, so that he almost expects to hear Nancy Sinatra’s voice coming out of her, singing ‘These Boots Are Made for Walkin’’ as she struts back and forth.

Sean wonders if Boots is going to walk all over him. Considering that he’s already crumbled on the name issue, he expects it’s inevitable. The thought doesn’t bother him, though. He feels decidedly cheery as he heads into the kitchen to start the coffee maker and prepare Boots’s breakfast. She hadn’t bolted when he wished her a good morning, and that was definitely a sign of progress.

Contemplating the array of Fancy Feast in the cupboard, Sean wonders why they don’t make breakfast meals for cats. Surely it can’t be right to feed Boots beef or chicken or seafood in the morning. He decides that he’ll email the manufacturer and suggest the idea. Or perhaps he should start his own cat food business, and create a line of designer cat breakfast foods, like ‘Savory Sausage and Scrambled Egg Feast’ or ‘Tender Pancake and Waffle Feast’. 

Boots, however, seems more than content with her ‘Savory Salmon Feast’, which was the closest Sean could come to an appropriate breakfast substitute, since people did after all eat bagels and lox with cream cheese in the morning. ‘Gourmet Bagel, Lox and Cream Cheese Feast’? Sean mentally adds it to the list.

In fact, Boots remains on the patio while Sean carries her bowl outside, and rushes in to start eating before he has even retreated all the way back to the sliding door. He stands listening to the cat’s rusty purr with a goofy grin on his face, and as he returns to the kitchen to have his own breakfast, he is convinced that the purr sounds a little better lubricated than it had last night.

The coffee maker has done its work in his absence, and the kitchen smells wonderfully of Jamaican Blue Mountain coffee. $45 a pound, and worth every cent. Sean fills a bowl with Kellogg’s Special K cereal ( _Can’t pinch an inch_ , his mind sings. Oh, if only that were true!), adds skim milk, then pours himself a glass of orange juice and a cup of coffee, and settles down at the kitchen table with a sigh of content to eat breakfast and read the paper. 

The change in his usual morning routine has unsettled him, and while he has absolutely no regrets, and certainly prefers this change to the ‘running around the front yard naked and babbling in the rain’ idea, it will take some getting used to.

As he’s perusing the Arts section, he hears the rumble of the garbage truck rolling down his street, and then the squeal of brakes as it comes to a halt by the end of his driveway. He isn’t really paying attention to the sounds. They are a familiar background noise on Monday and Thursday mornings, notable only when they are absent (and he is forced to call Wood Waste and Refuse Removal to complain).

So it takes him a moment to realize that the familiar background noise sounds somehow different today. There has been an almighty, ominous crash. The sort of crash that could only result from a garbage can - _his_ pristine, dent-free stainless steel garbage can - being dropped on his immaculately clean driveway.

Sean jumps up and hurries to the bow window that overlooks the driveway. He lets out a low moan as he witnesses the disaster that has unfolded. His garbage can is rolling back and forth unhappily on the macadam. The white plastic garbage bag that had been inside it has burst open and cascaded its contents across the driveway like some smelly Horn of Plenty.

“Fuck!” a voice exclaims loudly. “Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, _fuck_!” 

It’s the garbageman. A new garbageman, apparently, for Sean has never set eyes on him before. He is slender and dark-haired and bending over to shovel the garbage back into the remnants of the plastic bag with desperate haste. All the while a stream of ‘fucks’ and ‘shits’ pours from his mouth. 

Sean’s eyes are inexorably drawn to his ass, nicely outlined by the blue jumpsuit he wears. It is without a doubt the most perfect ass Sean has ever seen. So perfect that Sean is completely unable to maintain his feelings of outrage over the garbage disaster, not when it has given him an ass like this to admire. 

“Jesus Christ! Not another one,” growls an irritable voice. From around the side of the truck stalks a behemoth of a man whom Sean does recognize as one of the regular garbagemen on the route. “One fuckin’ day on the job and you’ve dropped more cans than I have in five years.”

“Sorry,” blurts out the hapless garbageman, shoveling Sean’s trash faster. 

“I don’t want apologies,” Behemoth states, grabbing Sean’s rolling garbage can and righting it. “I want you to stop dropping the fuckin’ garbage cans already.” 

Sean is overcome with an almost overpowering, and startling, urge to run outside and punch Behemoth in the nose. It’s only the young man’s first day on the job, after all. He doesn’t really know anything about the learning curve involved in refuse removal, but surely a few mistakes on the first day are… are…

The new garbageman has finished his shoveling, gathered together the torn edges of the plastic bag, and straightened with the bag clutched in his leather-gloved hands. As if he senses Sean’s gaze on him, he turns his head, much as Boots had last night, and the biggest, bluest eyes Sean has ever seen in his life meet his through the window, and WHAM! 

The train of his thought derails. If someone had asked Sean his name at that moment, he wouldn’t have had a single clue.

“Come on, get your fuckin’ ass in gear,” barks Behemoth, breaking the spell.

The garbageman looks away, hurries to the back of the garbage truck and throws the bag in with the rest of the neighborhood’s refuse. He scrambles nimbly up onto the side and holds onto the handle as Behemoth gets into the driver’s seat and puts the truck in gear. As the truck pulls away, his eyes cling to Sean’s as tightly as his hands are clinging to the metal handhold. 

They only stop staring at each other when the truck reaches the end of Sean’s block and disappears from view.

“What has just happened here?” Sean says aloud to the empty kitchen, not even caring this time that he’s talking out loud to himself. “I can’t possibly be attracted to a garbageman.” That perfect ass swims into his mind’s eye. “Can I?”

He should be outraged, he should be calling Wood Waste and Refuse Removal to complain. He will now have to get out the industrial strength cleaner and scrub and hose his filthy, germ-covered driveway before he goes to work, thus eating up the built-in time cushion that he always allows himself lest he be late for work when the traffic is even more hideous than usual.

_Sit down and finish your breakfast and paper,_ he tells himself strictly. It is just a blip on the radar screen, that’s all. An anomaly. The result of the changing of his rigid schedule to incorporate Boots’s needs. Forget about the garbageman and his perfect ass and his big, beautiful blue eyes…

But as Sean sits down and spoons up a mouthful of soggy Special K, he has only one thought: _How will I ever survive until Thursday?_

~end~


End file.
